More on the Linotype.

The post the other day I put up about the Linotype, brought back a lot of good memories of spending a year sitting in front of one when I worked at McGee printing in the early 70s. It was my first opportunity to run the old Linotype. Mr. McGee, the owner gave me a quick rundown on the finer points of running a Linotype, and then handed me the church bulletin and told me he need it before three. The keyboard was so confusing, it was nothing like a typewriter, and you had to really hit the keys hard similar to a manual typewriter to make it work. The Linotype machine uses a 90-character keyboard to create an entire line of metal type at once. That's how it got its name: 'line o' type'. This allowed much faster typesetting and composition than the original hand method. There is no shift key; uppercase letters have keys separate from the lowercase letters. The arrangement of letters corresponds roughly to letter frequency, with the most frequently used letters on the left.  The first two columns of keys are: e, t, a, o, i, n; and s, h, r, d, l, u. See what I mean about being confusing. After about 15 minutes of trial and error, I thought I had the hang of it. Or so I thought. On the Linotype you have to reach down with your left hand and pull a lever that engages the machine to the clutch. Once you pull the handle you can't let go and if the line of type is not tight (I found out that's what spacebands are for.) the hot molten lead will squirt on your arm. After two or three tries and a couple of blistered spots on my left arm I kind of got the hang of it.

This machine revolutionized newspaper publishing and made it possible for a small number of operators to set type for many pages on a daily basis. Before Mergenthaler's invention of the Linotype in 1884, no newspaper had more than eight pages.

The shop that I was working at was not a newspaper but a commercial job shop. It'd been in business since the 40s. The Linotype and letter presses had been the only methods of printing in the shop. Mr. McGee hired me because I had the experience of offset printing, which was really new to him. He had just bought an old 1250 multi offset press. It was a great 3 years that I worked there, and I learned a lot about Linotype's, letterpress, and hand set type from an old master of printing. Just one more example of printing being an art.

I wish I'd taken some pictures of the old machine so I could show them here. I found a photo on the Internet, I'll add it to give you an idea of the workings of the Linotype.